


Nickname (The Importance of One)

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Coping, Family, Gen, Nicknames, Science Fiction, scientist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 13:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because being Anders not Raleigh?  That's important. </p>
<p>Part of this <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/718075/chapters/1330348"> verse</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nickname (The Importance of One)

She's Anders only on this ship because there are three (used to be four) with that name in her family but ships seem to be a surname first basis and she hasn't got a nickname yet. Well she did but she kind of vetoes them because they never fit her quite right. But anyway, she's Raleigh Anders, Admiral's daughter not that she looks for favours, she just reminds people when she can quote military doctrine the same way she can the periodic table or taxonomic records.  
  
She has it good on this ship. She gets to go to different planets, kit out, collecting samples and she's one of the few people helping to breed some weird kind of jellyfish from the Bolig homeworld and if anyone messes up her samples it's pretty likely that she'll dissect them. Or that's the rumour. Honestly, she's too chill for that really. She likes when people visit her when she's working so she can swish around in her lab coat (a lab coat with stains and rips and a few chemical burns from that acid vomiting slug). Even better when she can wheel across the room in her spinny chair to get from computer to computer because she knows how to have fun. That's why people come to the lab so often, to see Raleigh because she cheers people up, she listens and she smiles and she pats their hand and usually there's something soft and fluffy that she can let them hold, showing them how to be gentle.  
  
Raleigh has a good life, she'd never say otherwise but she's a person. She's not stuck on the one setting. It's just that she has problems switching that part off.  
  
Raleigh doesn't let people see her down. Not since she was a kid. She wasn't her mother or Darwin when Drake died, didn't do the military front but she didn't cry like dad, loudly or around people. She held it in, felt her lip and chin ache from the strain of it, felt the lump rise up her throat to strangle her but she never cried in front of anyone apart from at the funeral and the wake. She waited until she was alone, the hum of her monitor, headphones in to shut the world out and typed, the screen a blur, her fingers hitting all the wrong keys. They have a thing on the net service that they have on the ship, just a little box and music on the screen where no one can see it and she puts it all there, lets her words be blasted apart. Because she feels sad. She doesn't know what to do with that. Actually, she doesn't really talk about herself. There's the surface stuff but never how she misses the space station when they're travelling for too long. That she sometimes never wants to leave the Passrmes homeworld or how the chef doesn't ever season her favourite meal correctly. She feels sad when she sits and reads the updated lists of endangered species that she gets or when there's a disaster and there are stray animals roaming around looking for homes they'll never find.  
  
She cried once when she came in and found that one of the lizards had died. Completely irrational. She stood there holding a dead lizard crying for fifteen minutes before she composed herself and pretended that everything was okay for the rest of the day. The doctor always seems satisfied that there's nothing wrong with her and given some of the people she works with? That old saying about throwing stones in glass houses definitely applies. She doesn't get so drunk she can't stand and get into fights, she doesn't punch her anger out at the gym and all of her stresses are largely self-inflicted, in her own mind at least. She works herself hard because she has high standards to meet, she is an admiral's daughter and she's on an important ship where they get a lot of important samples from investigations. She has to live for her brother, one of the three Anders children and Drake, well Drake was the explorer of the three of them and he died doing what he loved down on some unknown planet and even if she lives her life in the lab unless she's needed to pick things up. She doesn't do anything supremely dangerous. She can't. She isn't bold and brave, she doesn't even like to voice an opinion that could be seen as controversial. More like her father than her mother, quiet in their own way. Darwin is just like their mother who adheres to protocol in his cushy second-in-command job on whatever stuck up ship he's on. She doesn't get on with him now, missing the buffer of Drake.  
  
It's been a long time since she last went home. She prefers her dad meeting her at the space station instead to spend time with him so she can show him around her ship and he brings her favourite meals, cooked just the way she likes them as they eat in a corner of her lab. She calls her mother when she has to. Her mother knows everything she deems important anyway, Admiral Anders knows all she deems is necessary, that Raleigh is still in her position, still receiving commendations for her work (even if mother will remain forever disappointed that her daughter didn't chose to be a soldier or a pilot, that she chose something 'soft') and that she's passing her physicals. A social call from her mother is talking about her research and saying that she's fine. Raleigh's her own woman now and if she wasn't in the military, she knows somewhere deep in her bones that she'd have slowly cut off contact with her mother unless it was necessary.  
  
She's Anders here on this ship with her friends, the people who know her best. The only people outside her dad and Drake who ever come close to realising that sometimes, when she says she's okay, she's happy, she's having a good day that really, she isn't. And that means a lot. Being Anders, not Raleigh? Yeah, that means a hell of a lot more than she can ever put into words.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes the three Anders kids were named after folks who went off on grand voyages:  
> Sir Walter Raleigh  
> Sir Charles Darwin  
> Sir Francis Drake


End file.
